Everything You Need to Pack for Hiking Patagonia

Since trekking the “O” of Torres Del Paine is really a 7 days long camping trip (unless you are staying in refugios everyday), I think it’s best to categorize your packing list into three groups. Depending on the season you go, some of these gears need to adjusted. As a rule of thumb for hiking in Patagonia, you want to keep things that stay dry, keep you dry, and have a backup plan when things are not dry.

Clothes, Gear and food that I packed from home. Shown in this picture from top left to bottom right: Some length of rope, cliff bars and fruit bars, one pack of Ramen, dried mangos, sleeping pad, large pack rain cover, tent, sleeping bag, oatmeal packets, hot chocolate packets, 3L water bladder, Mountain House dry meals, one large bag of trail mix. Optimized clothing items are listed in my post below. I packed too much for this trip.

Liter size water bottles (1L). We found water source everywhere. Most of water from the streams are drinkable (which is crazy). We filtered for a day then realized that everyone else were drinking stream water straight. We filtered again at Seron because water from spigot at the refugio were muddy from the rainstorm.

Sunglasses: also functions as good eye protection in windy conditions in Patagonia

Sunscreen

Chapstick with sunscreen

Insect repellent wipes (light to carry even though we didn’t have any bug troubles)

A small ziploc bag with matches in case the piezo ignitor on your stove fail

Cooking pots, bowls and Utensils

Group 3: Food (you need to calculate how much food to pack depending on how many days you have, how many hours you hike per day and how much ground you are covering). I have read 250-500 calories per hour of hiking but I often don’t have enough appetite for that much food while hiking with a heavy pack. Our plan was to hike 7 days to complete the O. One of the camps (Camp Chileno) required us to purchase 3 meals from their kitchen.

A small plastic water bottle filled with rum (makes the cold nights wonderful)

I learned to minimize the amount of clothing to bring on long treks like this one. It’s unnecessary as you will inevitably get smelly. Almost all of the serviced refugios and campsites have shower facilities. There are also shops at each refugio to pick up some last minute items you forget.

Are you excited yet?

What do you think about my packing list? Anything else you’d like to add? This list is obviously created retrospectively. I carried way more clothing on this trip than needed.

Next Trip

Big Island, HawaiiJanuary 31st, 2020

We took a 10 month hiatus from big trips. Now our lives have changed forever. We still want to take multiday hikes in the future but they may look slightly different with the addition of a tiny human in the picture.